On a Thursday night in West Hollywood, an elegant multi-level townhouse is filled with fashionable guests clutching bottles of fragrance the same way partygoers clutch cocktails. They bring scents to their noses as they mix and float through space.
In the corner, two well-known faces in the fragrance community, Tishni Weerasinghe (@thatbrownperfumegirl) and Chase Chapman (@persecution), feature stations featuring their favorite homey scents (from bedtime refreshments to everyday comforts for working from home) while a small group leans in, asks questions, and watches which scents resonate. Upon inhaling the blend of white musk, floral notes and amber in Lattafa's Rouat Al Musk, a $16 fragrance from Weerasinghe's collection, attendees ooh and nods with enthusiastic approval.
In another corner, guests try fragrance combinations, aromas expertly blended with drinks, letting the aroma and flavors mingle through their senses. Outside on the rooftop, the crowd engages in small conversations over snacks and views of the city.
Sarah Bowen, co-founder of the Smellers Club, smells a fragrance.
This is the Scent Club. To an outsider, it might seem like a meeting focused on a niche fixation, but within this world, the fragrance is much more expansive. Here, it is a bridge between people, a tool for self-expression, a way to understand one's tastes and, increasingly, a reason to connect. The evening's gathering will take place at the home of Daniel Scott and Ronn Richardson, the duo behind the fine line of home fragrances. Space.
Some guests are simply curious about smells, while others have deep roots in the world of fragrances. An assistant, Jess Blaise, co-founder of Haitian spotlight in Los AngelesShe attributes her connection to scent to her Haitian heritage and the fragrance rituals modeled by her mother. He recently purchased a bottle of Frederic Malle's Carnal Flower for his personal collection, a luxury tuberose known for its white floral profile and appeal among niche collectors. About her culture, she explains: “Part of your presentation (of dressing up) is your smell.”
The meeting was held at the home of Daniel Scott (left) and Ronn Richardson, co-founders of home fragrance brand Space. Space offers a range of luxury candles and home fragrances.
Across Los Angeles, fragrance clubs are transforming what was once a solitary ritual into something communal. From rooftop gatherings in West Hollywood to casual get-togethers in parks further east, these hangouts tap into a growing desire to find relaxed, unstimulating ways to spend time together, offering an alternative to the usual rotation of restaurants, bars and crowded nights out.
Reverie of Scent turns a small corner of Elysian Park into a mini fragrance salon on Saturday mornings once a month. Founded in November 2025 by Marian Botrous, with the support of her husband, Errol, and sister, Marlene, the club started with just four members at the first meeting. By its sixth meeting last April, attendance had quintupled, with a mix of regulars and newcomers at each session.
“It's a huge world,” Botrous says of the perfume. “Exploring it together makes it more interesting.”
Fragrance lovers hang out on the rooftop at the Smellers Club's West Hollywood hangout.
At their picnic-style gatherings, attendees arrive with blankets, snacks, and aromas to exchange or discuss. With 2-milliliter samples costing up to $12, “collecting new scents gets expensive quickly,” says Bostrous. “Our meetings make it accessible and fun.”
There is a mix of informal socializing and structured discussion: conversations have explored the motivations behind fragrance use, from seduction to personal comfort, as well as the cultural impact of certain perfumes, such as Chanel No. 5 and its connection to Marilyn Monroe and old-school luxury glamour. At one meeting, a member brought a fragrance called Scentless Apprentice, inspired by the novel “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” by Patrick Süskind (which Kurt Cobain loved so much he wrote the Nirvana song “Scentless Apprentice”).
Artist Megan Lindeman, who founded Silverlake Scent Club in August 2025, it will also bring people together to explore scents as a shared social experience. Lindeman says she was inspired by the broader olfactory culture of Los Angeles and a curiosity about what it would feel like to center scent in a community setting. The group meets monthly in their Silver Lake backyard, where attendees explore fragrance as material and memory.
Black Girl Perfume Club was founded in 2023 by Taylyn Washington-Harmon and launched online before expanding to in-person gatherings. Across Substack, instagram and IRL meetings, brings together fragrance lovers and newcomers eager to deepen their understanding in an interactive way. “I started the club when fragrance popularity was still niche, and now seeing it go mainstream is really exciting,” Washington-Harmon says. As interest grows, she hopes more people will also explore the range of art produced by Black-owned fragrance lines.
Back at the house in West Hollywood, the crowd continues to vibe at the event led by Los Angeles natives Sarah Bowens and Jon Kidd, the duo behind Smellers Club, launched in January. They are brothers-in-law who grew up together in the church and quickly realize that their respective partners, Zana and Zion, are unofficial members of the team and rock star followers.
Jess Blaise tries a Selnu fragrance.
Between them, Kidd brings the “fraghead” energy, a name for fragrance devotees who bring passion and a certain fluidity to fragrance culture. Coming from an event background, Bowens leads the curation and is considered more in the beginning stages of her fragrance journey.
When they began organizing these events, Bowens wasn't sure how captivating they would be. “I thought: Can people really sit here for hours and talk about fragrances?” she says. He got his answer quickly, watching the guests chat, laugh, and immerse themselves in lively conversations for hours.
Kidd points to wine and book clubs as “event muses” for the Smellers Club. “At a certain point, it stops being about the books or the wine or, for us, even the fragrances,” he says. “It's about the people.”
Chase Chapman presents scents from his personal fragrance collection for guests to discover at the Smellers Club meeting.
As people navigate adulthood and cycles of personal growth, challenging habits and shedding old identities, there are some underlying questions: Who am I really? What do I really like? And what feels good and in line with being comfortable? Fragrance communities can be a surprisingly basic place to explore these existential meditations. Bowens, for example, was recently drawn to Dossier's strawberry-flavored Fruits of Love, which surprised her since she considered herself someone who didn't like fruity aromas. These types of discoveries are familiar in the community: you can miss out on something satisfying simply because it doesn't match your predefined tastes.
Farah Elawamry, fragrance-focused content creator known as Farah's thoughtshas examined fragrance marketing and its links to rigid gender norms, explaining that “the iris note is always given to feminine fragrances and orris is always given to the masculine fragrance genre, and they are literally the same note: one is the root, the other is the flower.” Once you start diving into the history and psychology of fragrances, he says, “you start to question what you really like versus what marketing people tell you to enjoy.”
Compared to the typical Los Angeles nightlife, attendee Shaunt Kludjian says gatherings like these seem more intentional. “This turned out to be better than the clubs in Los Angeles,” he says. “Everyone just vibes and connects through the aroma.” Kludjian is founder of the Los Angeles candle company. Whiff and came to the event to network. Frustrated by traditional candle formats, he launched a line of portable candles packaged in small tuna-like tins, designed so that “home follows you wherever you go.”
As Kidd looks around and watches strangers become friends by smelling musk or jasmine, he reflects on some of the magic of the Smellers Club and other fragrance communities.
“Fragrance is a portal to your memory,” he says. “So by coming to something curated that is a wonderful night, you are ingraining a memory.”
What started as a question of what smells good has turned into something more: small moments of recognition between many people who, just a few hours before, were complete strangers. Maybe that's the point. The bottles will be saved. Everyone will return to their respective corners of the city. But the feeling of being seen, of meeting your people, however briefly, stays with you long after the smells fade.
